One Sentence Blurb

Yesterday on the KT Literary blog, agent Kate Schafer challenged her readers to write a one sentence tag line about their book. Because of my blog reading schedule, I did not see it until this morning (which was actually fortuitous). Generally, I really really suck at summarizing. I was the kid that when our English teacher told us to write a two page short story, I turned in 25 pages. I just couldn't go shorter. (Lucky I had an English teacher who was willing to read that much). I once wrote a 400,000 word novel. For those of you who don't write books - that's a lot. I really struggle with writing synopses of my books.

I don't have the same trouble with query letters, because I don't treat them like synopses. I always imagine I'm writing the back of a book blurb. However, I am far from a query letter expert, and I often focus on the wrong thing. Which is weird.

So needless to say when I saw the one sentence challenge my mind said, "I'll never be able to do that." However, because I was late to the game, I got to read everyone else's comments and one commenter gave excellent advice. Basically she said you need to list a protoganist, a choice, and a consequence (thank you Wendy!).

You would think that would be straightforward for anyone to see, but it wasn't for me.

So after thinking about it for a moment, here is what I came up with for me, MG fantasy book:

In Bittersweet Fountain's Spirit Riddled, a middle grade fantasy novel, a twelve-year-old former street urchin struggling with her abandonment must learn to use her “demon”-given abilities to save the man who took her off the streets and has become her only family.

I felt it was important in my tag line to add it was a middle grade fantasy novel, mainly because if you don't say its fantasy, people might expect something completely different. And I feel that most of the other books on the blog took place on Earth, which would definitely be a little confusing.

If you're a writer reading this, I challenge you to write your own one liner. Whether you are a writer or not, I challenge you to look at mine and think if its an interesting tag line. Does it make the book seem interesting? Does it make you want to read it? Are you dying to see it in print? (OK, maybe that last one is too much).

If you guys have any comments on my one liner, let me know.